Poe's Detective Mysteries Comparison Essay by Jay Writtings LLC

This paper focuses on Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Mystery of Marie Roget", which are among the first modern detective mystery stories. The paper shows how Poe introduced the idea of a fictional detective investigating a real-life unsolved murder and compares the beginnings of both stories. The paper highlights Poe's literary devices in both works, which include the depiction of police as incompetent and self-serving, his use of newspapers to narrate the story, and his use of the gothic genre. The suggestion is made that some of these similarities between the two works may be the result of being written so close together, since "The Purloined Letter", which was written several years afterwards, is a very different detective story.